This thesis studies the metalinguistic phonotactic knowledge in Albanian heritage speakers whose
dominant language is Greek, aiming to investigate whether phonotactics in a heritage language can
be incompletely acquired and/or attrited. To this end, a group of 6 Albanian heritage speakers who
were raised in Greece and a control group of 2 Albanian immigrants who moved to Greece in
adulthood participated in a three-consonant word-internal cluster syllabification task, syllabifying 66
nonce-words that contained clusters allowed by Albanian phonotactics, but disallowed by the
phonotactics of Modern Greek. The great between-subjects and within-subjects variability in the
results of both groups suggests incomplete acquisition of heritage phonotactics by heritage speakers,
as well as some degree of attrition in the first-generation Albanian immigrants. I argue that this
variability is attributed to the use of Multiple Parallel Grammars (Kiparsky, 1993; Anttila, 2002a,
2002b; Anttila and Cho, 1998; Revithiadou and Tzakosta 2004a, 2004b; Tzakosta, 2004, among others),
which is indicative of incomplete acquisition and non-native ultimate attainment in the phonotactic
knowledge of heritage speakers, while the use of Multiple Parallel Grammars by first generation
immigrants can suggest first language attrition of phonotactics.